Here's a scenario. You've got a 10-day shoot. Forty-two scenes, eight locations, and your lead actor is only available for six of those days. Your DP has a hard out every Friday at 4pm. Two of your locations require permits that are only valid on weekdays. And it's November, so you lose daylight at 4:30.
That's not a hypothetical. That's a pretty standard indie shoot. And if you try to build your schedule by going through the script page by page and slotting scenes into days in order, you will run out of days before you run out of scenes.
A shooting schedule isn't a calendar. It's a puzzle. And the pieces are your constraints.
Start with constraints, not the script
Most people open their screenplay and start from scene one. That feels logical, but it's backwards. Your schedule doesn't care about story order. Your schedule cares about what's physically possible on a given day.
Before you place a single scene, list out everything that limits when and where you can shoot:
- Actor availability. Your lead might have a two-week window. A supporting actor might only be free on weekends. These windows are immovable — you build around them, not the other way around.
- Location access. Permits, business hours, noise restrictions, neighbor agreements. If you can only shoot at the restaurant on Mondays and Tuesdays before they open, that's your window. Period.
- Daylight. Exterior scenes in winter have maybe eight usable hours. In summer, you've got fourteen. This single variable can change how many scenes you can get through in a day.
- Equipment and crew. Rental windows, crew availability, vehicle logistics. If you rented a crane for three days, every scene that needs it goes in those three days.
Once you have your constraints mapped out, the schedule starts building itself. The scenes that must happen on specific days get placed first. Everything else fills around them.
The strip board is still the best tool for the job
Strip boards have been the standard scheduling tool in film production since the studio system. Each strip represents one scene — color-coded by location, INT/EXT, DAY/NIGHT — and you physically (or digitally) rearrange them across shooting days until the puzzle fits.
The reason this works better than a spreadsheet or a calendar view is that it lets you see your entire production at a glance. You can spot problems immediately: too many exterior day scenes stacked on the same day, an actor working 14 straight days without a break, two locations that are an hour apart scheduled back-to-back.
Digital strip boards keep the same visual approach but let you drag and drop scenes between days, auto-calculate page counts, and flag conflicts. If you're still managing a shoot in Google Sheets, moving to any strip board — even a simple one — will save you hours.
Group by location, not by story order
Every time your crew packs up equipment, loads it into vehicles, drives to a new location, unloads, and sets up again, you lose somewhere between 45 minutes and 3 hours. That's called a company move, and it's the single biggest killer of production schedules.
Spielberg shot Raiders of the Lost Ark wildly out of script order. Every scene set in the same location was shot together — regardless of where it fell in the story. The Marion's bar sequence, the Well of Souls, the desert chase — each location was completed before moving on.
You should do the same. If scenes 4, 17, 31, and 45 all take place in the same apartment, shoot them in the same day or block of days. It doesn't matter that they're spread across the script. Your editor will put them back in order. Your schedule needs them together.
One company move per day is fine. Two is manageable if the locations are close. Three is a red flag. If your schedule has three company moves on the same day, something needs to change.
Account for the things you'll forget
New producers schedule scenes. Experienced producers schedule everything around the scenes. Here's what usually gets left off:
- Travel time. If your morning location is 40 minutes from your afternoon location, that's 40 minutes plus load-out and load-in. Budget at least 90 minutes for a company move, more if you're hauling a grip truck.
- Meals. SAG-AFTRA requires a meal break within 6 hours of first call. Non-union shoots should follow the same rule — a hungry crew is a slow crew. That 30-minute lunch isn't optional; build it into the schedule.
- Turnaround time. If your crew wraps at 11pm, calling them at 6am the next day is a 7-hour turnaround. Union minimums are typically 10-12 hours. Even on non-union shoots, short turnarounds lead to mistakes, injuries, and people quitting.
- Setup and teardown. A scene might be two pages long, but if it's a dialogue scene with three camera setups and a lighting change, you're looking at 2-3 hours, not the 45 minutes the page count suggests.
- Hair, makeup, and wardrobe. If a character goes from clean-shaven to beaten and bloody between scenes shot on the same day, that's a makeup change that can take 30-90 minutes. Shoot the clean version first.
A good rule of thumb: take your estimated time for a day and add 30%. If your scenes add up to 8 hours of shooting, plan for a 10.5-hour day. That margin is where reality lives.
Build in buffer. More than you think.
Every production that's ever gone over schedule had the same problem: the schedule assumed everything would go right. Weather would cooperate. Actors would nail it in three takes. Equipment wouldn't break. Nobody would get sick.
Things will go wrong. The question is whether your schedule has room for it.
The standard recommendation is to add 10% to your total shoot days as buffer. Ten-day shoot? Schedule eleven. Twenty-day shoot? Schedule twenty-two. That extra day (or two) is cheaper than the overtime, re-shoots, and crew morale damage of running over.
If you can't add full buffer days, at least keep your hardest days early in the schedule. Front-load complex scenes, stunts, and exterior work. If something slips, you have the tail end of the shoot — typically simpler interior work — to absorb the spillover.
Pick the right tool for how you work
A spreadsheet can technically hold a shooting schedule. So can a whiteboard, a notebook, or a stack of index cards. The question isn't whether you can use them — it's how much time you spend reorganizing when a location falls through at 9pm the night before.
Dedicated scheduling tools exist because the reorganization problem is where all the time goes. Drag a scene to a different day, and everything downstream — call times, actor counts, page totals — updates automatically. That's not a nice-to-have. On a fast-moving indie production, that's the difference between a 20-minute fix and a 2-hour replanning session.
There are several options at different price points — we cover them in our StudioBinder alternatives guide. The short version: find something that gives you a visual strip board, handles drag-and-drop, and can generate a call sheet from your schedule. Everything else is a bonus.
The schedule is a living document
Your schedule will change. Accept that now. The version you lock before day one will look different by day three. Locations change. Actors get sick. Weather doesn't cooperate.
The goal isn't a schedule that survives contact with reality unchanged. It's a schedule that was built well enough to adapt quickly when things shift.
Start with your constraints. Group by location. Account for the stuff between scenes. Build in buffer. And use a tool that lets you rearrange things at midnight without starting over from scratch. That's it. That's the whole secret.